Directed by:
Alex GarlandScreenplay:
Alex GarlandCinematography:
Rob HardyCast:
Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman, Jesse Plemons, Nelson Lee, Sonoya Mizuno, Jefferson White (more)VOD (3)
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An adrenaline-fueled thrill ride through a near-future fractured America balanced on the razors edge. (A24)
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Reviews (14)
Recall the three year old event when the Trump mob stormed the Capitol. Alex Garland sensitively and thoughtfully directs this theme, this societal schism, into disconnected mini-stories, with just these aforementioned protagonists (and they don't need a buffalo head to do it) killing because "real fucking America", all of which the protagonists, journalists, follow on their way to Washington. As long it stays in the road movie waters, with lots of iconic scenes, it's great. Unfortunately, Garland flips the switch at the end, and with the arrival in D.C., it becomes a regular war movie that felt like a mannerism in its denouement and showdown. Not only did it leave me cold at the end, but I actually thought "and that's it, Alex?". Too bad, we had the build-up to the movie event of the year, and well, it's not. But still an honest 4 stars (no stripes) for the impressive heaviness and disillusionment with humanity in the first two thirds.
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A violent nightmare that I dreamed for some unknown reason. Kind of like Children of Men from Wish. Garland somewhat mechanically adorns his shady road movie with random images of a broken America. A number of them are impressive, with powerful visuals and staging (mainly the scene with Jesse Plemons). The film manages to induce anxiety to the point of nausea from a cruel world that is not so far from The Walking Dead in its absence of morality and prevalence of brutality. But…the whole thing seems terribly gratuitous; for all of the questions that the film wants to raise, Garland’s work just shrugs its shoulders and wagers on another spectacular composition. The characters are flat and the ethics and psychology of the war reporters come across as very superficial research. There is little in the way of Nietzschean gazing into the abyss in this film, which paradoxically comes across as terribly thesis-based and illustrative, but it isn’t at all clear what its thesis is or what it actually illustrates. An impressive exercise in unclearly straddling the line between a skilfully made spectacle and a not so skilfully rendered metaphor of a divided country. It’s actually a reiteration of my problem with Garland, a maker of spectacular movies that are dull at their core.
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Alex Garland's awkward Salvador. In it there was a sentence that you have to get closer to get to the truth, or if you want reality, then fidelity. If you get too close, you die. Here, the distance wasn’t ideal, whether due to poorly written and cast characters, or the vagueness of initially heroizing the impartiality of a war journalist’s badge, only to later point out the dangers of national polarization (as someone humorously remarked, putting together California and Texas is like a coalition between Sweetgreen and KFC). If the peak of the intense episodes was to be Plemons’ lime-like quality, then the connections between them, meant to profile and develop characters, didn’t set the bar very high. The final militant pornography from D.C. was just missing Gerard Butler, on the right side, of course.
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Picture of the cruelty, where the first two parts wandering in an anthill of trivia and sudden traumas surprisingly a decent piece better than the finale. It probably had to be here so it wouldn't be a journey from nowhere to nowhere, but its giant scale takes away from the intensity of storytelling about people I understand (because they do something that needs to be done, even if others don't understand) just as much as they infuriate me (because they act like ordinary adrenaline addicts). The last few minutes are pure provocation, which Garland deserves for his long-standing genre diversity at the end (?) of his filmmaking career, but I can't help but wonder if such audacity brought joy to anyone other than himself. 70%
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I like Alex Garland's work and even though he makes films that aren't exactly audience friendly, he hasn't stepped on my toes once so far, so I was curious to see how he'd handle a slightly different material, more audience friendly, with a blockbuster format and on a very topical subject, and it's great, though not without its faults. It's a war road movie set in a war-ravaged America with an apocalyptic tinge that has a very slow pace most of the time, but thankfully it works thanks to convincing actors, decent dialogue and an uncomfortable atmosphere. I was a bit bothered that we don't see the birth of the conflict but are thrown somewhere in the middle, and also that the whole film is from a journalists point of view, I would have liked to see what's going on in other parts of America or some behind the scenes from the government on what the president is currently dealing with/planning, but never mind. The highlights are two scenes: the confrontation with Jesse Plemons, which has a very chilling atmosphere and a great build up, and then the finale – I was worried Garland would give us a three-minute shootout but he surprised us. We actually get more than twenty minutes of military action! A massive attack on the White House and it has it all: amazing sound of weapons, perfect cinematography, gripping atmosphere, in short it looks really dense and authentic, a perfect dreamlike action war finale. Of course, the few naturalistic shots are nice, but there could have been more of them. 80%
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